Justice

What the verdict says, to the astonishment of tens of millions of us, is that you can go looking for trouble in Florida, with a gun and a great deal of racial bias, and you can find that trouble, and you can act upon that trouble in a way that leaves a young man dead, and none of it guarantees that you will be convicted of a crime.

Founder of Integral Institute & Author on Evolutionary Spirituality

Tonight, anyone who truly understands what justice is and what it requires of a society is ashamed to call himself an American.

Creator of The Wire, acclaimed HBO crime drama series

Race and guns, both of which have conspired not only to take the life of a teenager, but to make that killing entirely permissible. I can't look an African-American parent in the eye for thinking about what they must tell their sons about what can happen to them on the streets of their country.

Creator of The Wire, acclaimed HBO crime drama series

There is nothing, however, in standard theories of money that requires transactions to be anonymous from tax- or law-enforcement authorities. And yet there is a significant body of evidence that a large percentage of currency in most countries, generally well over 50%, is used precisely to hide transactions.

Economist & Harvard Professor; Former IMF Chief Economist

The complexity of the topic combined with significant political and social blindness towards it, has led to disability becoming one of the most significant un-addressed issues of modern time.

Disability Rights Activist & Founder of the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People

Cyberspace has had a profoundly positive impact on humanity, but has also been abused, as a playground for criminals already used by some as a battle-space.

Human rights violations are not just legal failures - they're public health crises. When we deny people their basic dignity, we create conditions that harm entire communities for generations.

The law is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve justice. When the law fails to deliver justice, we must be willing to reform the law, not abandon the pursuit of justice.

Former Master of the Rolls & English judicial law reform pioneer

Freedom of expression isn't just about protecting popular speech - it's about creating the conditions where unpopular ideas can challenge power and where dissent can flourish without fear.

Voice actor best known for voicing Megatron in Transformers series

The real tragedy is that we have become so accustomed to injustice that we no longer recognize it when we see it. We've normalized inequality, normalized discrimination, normalized the idea that some people matter less than others.

Executive Director of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

Society at large only sporadically pays attention to the extraordinarily despair-producing conditions in which young black poor youth attempt to survive.

Hip-hop scholar and cultural critic; author of "Black Noise

Hip-hop gives a ground-level view of what it might mean to live under what are nearly warlike conditions in communities that face a myriad of daunting circumstances.

Hip-hop scholar and cultural critic; author of "Black Noise

A good deal of hip hop speaks and has always spoken openly and in depth about aspects of black urban poverty, particularly the grip that street culture has on many young people.

Hip-hop scholar and cultural critic; author of "Black Noise

We are talking about three million people who, in effect, are the property of another person and in many cases could be killed, by their owner, with immunity.

More girls have been killed in the past fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine 'gendercide' in any one decade, than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.

As war ravaged Liberia, I realized it is women who bear the greatest burden in prolonged conflicts. We began organizing Christian and Muslim women to demonstrate together, launching protests and a sex strike to help oust Charles Taylor.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner & Liberian Peace Activist & Women's Rights Leader